Rhythm of War is book four in Sanderson’s epic fantasy Stormlight Archive series. Goodreads tells me I read the prior book Oathbringer back in Nov 2017, but didn’t bother writing a review, so I had to make sure I’d write one now.
The book’s launch day kind of caught me a bit unexpectedly so I didn’t bother doing a re-read of the previous three books. Which given an epic fantasy series of this scope might have been a mistake, but watch me do it again for book five. No review meant while reading every so often I’d stop and be like “Who is this character again, and why is she here?” Which is to be expected for this kind of thing, probably if GRRM ever manages to bring out Winds of Winter that’ll be a thing again. It’s a whole big sprawl.
I got this book on launch day last Nov 17. The review for the second book Words of Radiance tells me it took me three weeks to get through it, so I was kind of expecting I might take until 2021 with this one. It only took me a around eight days, with the last third of the book taking me a single read in one long night. So, that says a lot about how good the book is and how the pacing is.
It’s a really fun book actually, things are happening, and there’s character growth and everything, and I feel like this one touched a lot more on the cosmere stuff. Or maybe I was just notificing more things because no review meant I was reading the wiki more. (Don’t worry I managed not to spoil myself!). It’s great that Sanderson manages to just put in a lot of stuff and give all of the lead characters significant things to do and character arcs and so on.
There’s some happenings near the end that turn around some things the characters thought they knew about their history; not as big as the one in Oathbringer, but that’s always fun. And some things happen where I’m not sure how the next book is going to handle it, so I’m looking forward to that. (Trying not to be too spoilery here of course!) At Sanderson’s rate, it’s gonna be at least 3 years before book 5 comes out, and even after that, the series is expected to have a second 5-book arc, plus there’s some side books that I feel like I should read because they introduce some relevant characters (Edgedanger, etc) so there’s still a lot of Stormlight Archive to look forward to!
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